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I thought it would be interesting to capture the process of writing a book, complete with a timeline. I’m not a fast writer, and I don’t intend to do this daily, but whenever something of interest happens I’ll jot it down. Nothing that will give away the plot, but things about the process.

So at the moment I’ve just launched “Eden’s Revelation”, Book II of The Order Series. It just went live last week, so a lot of the time has been spent marketing it. I really want to jump into Book III and finish the series. I have a lot of ideas as to where it should go, but there’s a lot of things left hanging that need to be resolved. I know in general what I want to happen and where it will take place, but who lives? Who dies? How does it all tie together? The details need to be worked out.

I have some ideas for a title, but I’m not sure enough yet to post them. One stands out at the moment, but I’m afraid to post it. Titles are hard. Maybe a better title will come to me as I write.

So for now I plan (tomorrow) to start the rough blocking of the chapters. That is, I’ll lay out general events, chapter by chapter, and see where it leads me. Blocking helps me see how things flow, but it’s a very fluid process. Most of it changes, and at one point I’ll be writing things on index cards and moving them around to order the chapters, but at least it’s a starting point from which to grow. During my long drives I’ve already had some ideas that I’ve texted myself from the car. I speak into the phone, so no worries – I’m not a distracted driver. The autocorrect is pretty hilarious sometimes, especially with the names I have for some of the characters. If you’ve read The Order Series, you’ll know what I mean.

Once the blocking is done I fill in the writing. For laughs, let me try and guess how long each phase will take so I can look back at this and realize how poorly I estimated. Let’s see, I think rough blocking will be done by…July 2016. Then I’ll start writing. The writing takes a long time – let’s say I’m done with it in…November 2016. Then rough editing starts. That takes a long time, too – let’s say I’ll finish that in January of 2017. Then final editing, book cover, launch, etc. So let’s set a target launch date of March 2016.

It took me 1 year from conception to launch for “The Second Tree”, and 1.5 years (well, 1 year 7 months) to launch “Eden’s Revelation.” Looking back it seems like I took a long time away from writing “Tree” before I tackled “Eden”. I don’t plan on doing that this time.